picatext 2.0

Picatext helps you recognize any text from the screen to make it editable. Thus, the tool can come in handy for extracting text chunks from a scanned document or a photograph, for instance.

Actually, the app’s workflow could not be made any easier: just grab a section from your screen and let the tool do the rest.

The application has a very nice and minimalistic interface. With a push of a button, you can choose the screen region containing the intended text. Moreover, you can use a hotkey combination to do the same thing. Then, the tool automatic uses optical character recognition and displays the text in editable form. Fortunately, more than 40 different languages are supported to provide more accurate results. However, it is a shame that the typeface is too small and there is no way to change it. Likewise, it would be good if it could perform a spellcheck.

All in all, Picatext is good at extracting text from any kind of image. Still, compared with other similar tools, it is not as unobtrusive, as it cannot reside in the Menu Bar. Similarly, it does not allow using custom hotkeys or translating the recognized text to other languages. Finally, you may want to know that this product can be purchased from the Mac Store.